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Decedent Empires · Nov 12, 12:06 PM
I love the visual arts & in particular I love paintings on canvas. This tradition is so rich in nuance, variation, & sheer mastery that no matter how many times the avant garde writes off easel painting, the practice continues to produce brilliant artists like Richard Diebenkorn, Brice Marden, & generation after generation of painters who refuse to yield the genre to irrelevance. It is, apparently, a deeply sensual medium for both painter & viewer; it keeps attracting both, obviously. And I don’t resent Marden getting rich from painting, nor do I mind Diebenkorn’s heirs profiting from the painter’s genius. There is something there, after all, of worth. How do calibrate the value is another matter. The market for paintings is one way; considering the justice of such prices would represent another approach, but then one would have to monetize justice, probably a bad idea.
Still, the use of paintings as a medium of economic exchange & as markers of social status has always struck me as inimical to the spirit of the art. And, yes, I know that spirit is a cheap substitute of essence & that I don’t really believe that art practices have essences. I just can’t think of another way to put this. Clearly, I am drawing on the Romantic elevation of art to the “spiritual” realm, though that very move tends toward the anti-Romantic separation of art from life. (Perhaps Romanticism is just the dream that life can aspire to the orderly condition of art.) Nevertheless, whatevery my own romantic reservations, the use of artworks as markers of wealth & status is no doubt as old as civilization.
But that is prologue: The recent sale of four Gustav Klimt paintings for multiple millions of dollars seems, at least, historically appropriate. The paintings were made in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (itself a late, last gasp of the Hapsburg Empire) & have now reached the status of fetish in the last days of the American Empire. Late empires seem to produce astonishing works of art, philosophy & poetry. Wittgenstein was thinking in Vienna even as Klimt was painting there, though it is hard to imagine two more disparate sensibilities.
The irony here is that those Klimt paintings have become fetishes of wealth & power in our own disintegrating imperial system.
Sensual & superficial, Klimt’s work has long attracted & repelled me. Golden surfaces & pallid skin tinged with blue. None of Klimt’s pinks look healthy, either, have the flushed look of fever. Sex & death, of course & Klimt is a master of that particular nexus. Klimt’s eroticism is perfect for this American historical moment, which finds the country at war with itself, the frantic, objectifying sexuality of MTV & internet porn ranged against the profound puritanism & homophobia of the religious right, with its self-denial & hypocrisy. That the Klimt paintings went for record prices is not surprising. He’s an artist appropriate to our times, though finally he has little to teach us. His is not a critical sensibility.
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